Dear Editor:
In response to Kirsten Christensen Roberts’ opinion piece: Yes, Kristen, your young people were deceived in 2016 and they unwisely voted for Donald Trump not realizing you don’t vote for an individual, you vote for a party.
This truth was imparted to a freshman government major at a small SBC Midwestern university in the early 1950s. The professor explained that whether the individual had 25 years of perfect Sunday school attendance pins or was a habitual drunkard, if he or she voted 95%, either Democrat or Republican, you had not elected an individual but you had elected a Democrat or a Republican, basically making the morals of the politician irrelevant.
In 2024, our young people get to vote again, but now with some idea of what they are voting for, and they don’t have to listen to their mother who lies about the Donald having a rape conviction — he never has been charged or convicted in a criminal case for rape — and has an obvious hatred of Fox News although it covers many worthwhile stories which the mainstream news buries.
These youngsters now have lived four years under Republican rule and three years under Democratic rule and have the mental acuity to decide whether they like one better than the other. Also, they can examine each party’s platform to see which they feel confers a better chance for them to enjoy a good life.
One platform believes abortion should be an available option at all times, some even believing it should be available after a live birth. The other platform basically believes murdering humans, even though still in the womb, is against God’s law, although many are willing to make certain exceptions.
One platform promotes substantial social programs far beyond the nation’s fiscal income, evidently not believing the old proverb of “when one’s outgo exceeds one’s income, one’s upkeep becomes one’s downfall.” When a government borrows money to cover its income shortfall, the resulting inflation lowers all of its citizens’ standard of living.
The other platform calls for fiscal responsibility, keeping in place tax laws that permit the top 1% of U.S. taxpayers to shoulder over 20% of the personal income tax; the top 10% to pay about 70%, while the bottom 50% of U.S. personal income tax payers pay less that 3%, well below their fair share.
One platform believes in secure borders with a rational immigration policy while the other platform promotes open borders resulting in a mass migration of individuals without basic safeguards regarding their health issues, diseases they have or their desire to assimilate to the laws of this nation disclaiming their ethnic legal system (such as Sharia law). Such immigrants absorb significant percentages of any community’s medical and educational facilities reducing the standards previous enjoyed by its own citizens.
One platform promotes “climate change” as an undeniable truth, which results in legislating somewhat silly things like the amount of water than can flow through a shower head to items of extreme importance like the production of energy. There is empirical evidence the earth is warming. Evidence that man is causing it is far weaker. Many geologists believe the earth, for millions of years, has a 40,000-year warming cycle with interruptions of the cycle plus or minus every 16,000 years — a belief supported by the evidence of ice cores taken both from the Artic and the Antarctic. Those who believe man is the cause of the earth’s warming need to explain why the temperature of Mars is increasing at the same percentage as that of Earth.
The other platform recognizes that with the earth’s two largest population centers, India and China, are making no effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions, with China starting up a new coal-fired electrical generation plant every week, ever year. Also, man has no possible way of stopping Mother Nature from volcanic eruptions which frequently put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a few days than man does in several decades. Thus, spending any significant part of the nation’s income on “climate change” is foolish.
It is not the intent of this article to go down the party platforms of the two major parties, but just to show there are very significant differences in voting for Republican governance for the next four years verses voting for Democratic governance.
Our youth now are mature enough to recall the life they enjoyed during the four years of Republican governance and can compare it with the life they currently have under Democrat governance. They are smart enough to figure out which they prefer, and they will vote appropriately.
Burton H. Patterson, Southlake, Texas